


Somewhere to Rest

by greygerbil



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-18
Updated: 2013-11-18
Packaged: 2018-01-01 23:39:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1049953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/pseuds/greygerbil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Sheriff considers his relationship to Chris, which is complicated, but worth the trouble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somewhere to Rest

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a TW kinkmeme prompt that asked for fluff between Chris and the Sheriff.

“There’s going to be zombies?”

Chris, kneeling on the ground next to the hole they had dug, shook his head. He was positioning the bundle of fertilized earth and thin roots still pressed vaguely into a planter’s shape from which the elder tree grew.

“That would be too easy,” he said, scratching at the soft, wet earth. After a little pulling, a fist-sized stone was dislodged and Chris put it aside. “Tip it a little more to the left.”

With a hand tight around the thin stem, the Sheriff followed his order.

“It’s usually single possessions. But that makes it more difficult. A shambling mass of zombies... I own frag grenades that could take care of that in a minute.” 

“You own frag grenades?”

“I own anti-tank grenades, too.”

John sighed.

“Chris, can you at least try and make it a little easier for me not to arrest you on the spot?” Sure, consulting security firms was his official job, with the licenses to go along. However, Agent McCall wasn’t exactly receptive to that argument when Chris was so far the only lead he’d ever been able to find for anything that happened in Beacon Hills and his superiors were getting restless. Keeping McCall from putting his partner behind bars had become an essential part of John’s working life. “What do you need them for, anyway? I’ve never seen Scott and the Scooby Gang in an M2 Bradley.”

“They’re effective against golems.”

“Of course they are,” John said, resigned. He wanted to ask when exactly Chris had found out about this, but he had long made the rule for himself that one new supernatural monstrosity per conversation was enough.

“If there’s no zombies, what’s the tree for?”

The sweet smell of the white blossoms was now John’s fingers. Chris was filling up the hole with earth to steady the bushy tree.

“I’ve never heard of more than two or three bodies revived at the same time,” he said after a too-long pause, looking up at John as he patted the earth to stay firm around the stem. “Don’t forget that most things that hunt in the night are very smart. Often, they’re almost human or once were. To bring back the dead needs a lot of power, much more than they’d be worth if they only acted like wild animals. But Darachs can do it... others, too, who know that sort of magic.”

He got to his feet.

“These... shades, they will usually stalk people, bring them to the very edge of sanity.” He tapped the side of his own head. “Drive a human crazy and with a bit of finesse they can be turned into a servant or a serial killer or both. And even if people understand what’s following them is not the person they loved, if someone finds a way to destroy the thing, they’ll usually think of them as a murderer, even against all reason.”

The wind felt a little colder to John while he listened. Maybe Chris just knew how to speak to him in a way he understood, but John often thought that they were simply scared of the same things. There was very little that could be as frightening as humans at their worst and most desperate. Sometimes, when he plucked apart the motives of those supernatural crimes that had gone on around him – the struggle for power, for purpose, the fight for revenge – he realised he’d seen it all before at the station, just without the fairy dust.

“I planted elder on Victoria’s and Kate’s graves two years ago, too. They ward off the evil influence and protect the corpses. A druid’s trick, but that’s mostly what magic is – knowledge.”

With his sleeve, Chris brushed some dirt crumbs off the gravestone. Chris had never met Claudia, but as he now cleaned her monument after having set her warden in place, John felt like he had introduced them – more than he ever had in the monologues he spoke at her memory in his head (and there had been embarrassingly many of those).

As Chris climbed over the low hedge around Claudia’s grave, John took the opportunity to grab his cold hand still caked in wet grave earth to steady him, then kept holding it. The hunter looked to him with mild surprise, but didn’t protest. They stood in silence by the grave, the grey sky growing darker above. His thumb brushed over the gold band on Chris’ hand. He had never asked him to take it off; Chris had never mentioned the one John wore, either. They both knew they’d found a man with a piece of his soul already missing. There was no fixing that, there shouldn’t be.

Because of the rings, people who saw them on date night often thought they were married. That didn’t bother John – being mistaken for Chris’ husband wasn’t the worst thing in the world. It was true that their shared, badly scarred wounds had brought them closer. Almost fitting, then, that the rings should link them together in the eyes of others. But often enough, John would feel himself bounce the other way, wanting to speak up and make sure people realised he was the furthest thing away from forgetting Claudia.

Moving on felt like betrayal. For the past months, John had stumbeld back and forth between guilt and happiness, worry and relief and in the way Chris would sometimes look at him with all the heartache and doubt in the world, he knew he wasn’t the only one.

In short, it was complicated, but then, love tended to be when you were past fourty; when life had had enough time to throw mud at you from all directions, when you knew you might lose something even if it was perfect and you realised love was so much more fragile and so much more precious than it had seemed thirty years ago.

“Ready to go?” Chris asked.

John blinked twice to find himself in the graveyard again with night slowly falling.

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat and turned, letting go off Chris’ hand. “You wanna pass by Victoria and Kate?”

“I was there earlier.”

Chris wasn’t so keen on sharing the brunt of his grief and John had suffered through enough job-dictated counselling sessions to never ever want to tell someone how to handle their private breakdowns. Instead, they walked to the main road between the meadows covered in graves.

“How do we avoid the rest of the walking dead? Should we just plant about a hundred of elder trees around here?”

The corner of Chris’ mouth twitched. “I think by this point it’s worth considering to burn the whole Beacon Hills forest down and repopulate it with mountain ash, elder trees, holly and mistletoe.”

“Except we could rename it killer druid herb garden then.”

“Look who’s learning,” Chris joked.

“Sadly.” The Sheriff snorted. “Do you know I started out as a traffic cop?”

“You’ve gone places.”

“And I’ll go further. Like a mental asylum, if I ever report back to my superiors talking about toxic lizard people.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I admire the way you bullshit your way through reports,” Chris said, pushing the wrought iron gate in the graveyard wall open. The car park spread out to their right in the cold light of street lamps flickering alive in the twilight.

“Admire them by helping me to think of something for that selkie incident last week.”

“I have a day job, too. One that is thankfully much easier,” Chris said, smirking faintly as John raised his brows at him.

“You know,” the Sheriff began conversationally, “the longer you go on, the more I realise how much easier _my_ job were if I just did what McCall wants and threw you in a cell for a night or two. At least I’d have him off my back.”

“Except it would mean you would have to do what McCall wants.”

John was walking towards his car with slow, dragging steps. Going from the graveyard always felt like leaving something behind that should come home with him.

“I knew there was a catch,” John said.

The hunter slid into the front seat.

“I guessed it wasn’t the image of me in handcuffs that kept you from it.”

John rolled his eyes as he settled down in the driver’s seat, then leaned over and kissed Chris on the mouth. The heater of the car flicked on with a low hum, spreading stuffy air smelling faintly of gasoline and heat that seeped through his damp clothes. He tasted Chris, who was warm and alive, someone to lean on, someone to support. The dull emptiness the visit at the graveyard had left him with was dissipating.

It was all very complicated, but sometimes they made it feel so easy. Maybe it was time to start believing in the elder tree’s power, John thought, and hope it’d help him to let Claudia’s ghost rest in peace, too.


End file.
